The Ultimate Lean Hungry Man Appears to Have the Villagers Fooled

I worry. For some reason, the villagers in the beltway appear to have my governor confused with some one who is not a sociopath. There is absolutely no way they’ve done any background work on Bobby Jindal and the horrible things that he has done and suggested for my state. I have no idea why they want to embrace the false face that Jindal uses as he plots his way up the political ladder. It makes no sense to me at all. But, today’s beltway rube award goes to Chris Cizzilla who is usually more circumspect. He’s written an article at WAPO called “Bobby Jindal speaking truth to the GOP power”.

Chris, Jindal never speaks the truth. He only says what he thinks people like you want to hear so he can further his own political ambitions. Bobby Jindal’s only motive is personal power. That is the only thing constant about him. He will do and say anything to get ahead. It will not be a “forceful denunciation”. It will be a carefully orchestrated attempt to get attention and to confuse people like you.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will deliver a forceful denunciation of his party’s Washington-centric focus in a speech to the Republican National Committee on Thursday evening, arguing that the GOP is fighting the wrong fight as it seeks to rebuild from losses at the ballot box last November.

“A debate about which party can better manage the federal government is a very small and short-sighted debate,” Jindal will tell the RNC members gathered in Charlotte, N.C. for the organization’s winter meeting, according to a copy of the speech provided to The Fix. “If our vision is not bigger than that, we do not deserve to win.”

* On the party’s struggles to court non-white voters: “We must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior. …The first step in getting voters to like you is to demonstrate that you like them.”

* On the likes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock: “It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. We’ve had enough of that.”

And Jindal will also try to demonstrate the sort of big-picture vision — you know, “that vision thing” — that is in demand in a party searching for itself in the electoral wilderness. “We must shift the eye line and the ambition of our conservative movement away from managing government and toward the mission of growth,” Jindal will say.

With this speech, Jindal makes a strong case to be the leading voice — or at least one voice in a relatively small chorus — committed to leading the Republican party out of its electoral wilderness.

I will be watching for a transcript of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s speech to the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Charlotte tonight with considerable anticipation. It looks like he’s going to personally brand the tendency within the GOP to identify “party reform” with an even more ideologically savage brand of conservatism than the one they’ve already embraced.

In an account based on an advance copy of the speech, WaPo’s Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake (under the sycophantic headline, “Bobby Jindal Speaking Truth to GOP Power”—gag!) tell us this about Bobby’s Big Message …

Gag is right!!! All you have to do is read any of my fellow Louisiana Bloggers to figure out that any one who closely watches Jindal can’t stand him. I have yet to speak to a Doctor or an educator in the state that has one kind word to say about him. Here’s something recent from fellow Pelican CenLaMar.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve never shied away from criticizing Governor Bobby Jindal. To put it nicely, I think he is an intellectually dishonest charlatan whose entire life has been defined by an almost embarrassing public desire for validation among the white conservative aristocracy. As a child, he rejected his given name and demanded that his parents call him “Bobby” after the little boy on The Brady Bunch, a story that his supporters repeat as if it reveals some sort of precocious sophistication and nuance. Maybe it does. But, to me, it also reveals how, even at a very early age, Bobby Jindal was conflicted about his own identity as the son of two Indian graduate students who immigrated to the United States, a man who was conceived in India but who has spent almost the entirety of his public life distancing himself from his family’s culture, their religion, and his Indian heritage. As a college student, Jindal converted from Hinduism to Catholicism, a journey that he describes as both intellectual and spiritual, but one that also, particularly in hindsight, seems almost hyperbolically cynical and calculated. And here, perhaps I’m the one being cynical, but I’ve never believed his “conversion story.” I’ve never once believed that Bobby Jindal, an allegedly brilliant kid majoring in biology in an Ivy League school, actually participated in a real life exorcism. His story is non-sensical and absurd, unwittingly and pathetically bordering on the comedic; it is almost certainly a work of complete fiction. But in telling it, however awkwardly, in publishing it in a relatively well-known Catholic journal, Jindal asserted himself publicly not only as a Catholic but as a Catholic whose faith was built on a mystical experience, a direct confrontation with the devil himself.

When he was only 24 years old, as his own legend has it, he became Louisiana’s Secretary of Health and Hospitals based on the strength of a single white paper he’d written, which led some to begin calling him “The Boy Wonder,” and which led more level-headed people to question the judgment of his boss, Governor Mike Foster. The truth, of course, is that Jindal’s service at DHH was short-lived and an abysmal failure, which somehow qualified him to head the entire University of Louisiana system. Before Louisiana could blink, Jindal, only 31 years old, ran for Governor. When he lost to an imminently more qualified candidate, a candidate who made history in her own right, becoming the first woman ever elected Governor, Jindal’s team seemed to blame his defeat on his ethnicity, not his youth and inexperience, not on his track record as DHH Secretary.

It’d be easy enough for people to suggest that my skepticism and my cynicism of Bobby Jindal is really about identity politics, as if merely bringing up the ways in which he has attempted to downplay his Indian heritage and his consciously self-promotional conversion to Catholicism somehow demonstrates my own biases. But, to me, such an argument is and has always been a way of avoiding a series of important questions that have rarely, if ever, been asked of the man Louisiana has twice-elected as their Governor, the most important of which is: What does this guy really believe?

“By obsessing with zeroes on the budget spreadsheet, we send a not-so-subtle signal that the focus of our country is on the phony economy of Washington, instead of the real economy out here in Charlotte, and Shreveport (La.), and Cheyenne (Wyo.),” Jindal is set to say at one point in the speech. At another, he will argue that “Washington has spent a generation trying to bribe our citizens and extort our states,” adding: “As Republicans, it’s time to quit arguing around the edges of that corrupt system.”

So what’s that supposed to mean? Blowing up the “corrupt system” via nullification of secession? Just opposing every federal spending measure, regardless of merit? Do tell, governor.

What it means politically is a lot clearer: Jindal wants to be the champion—and perhaps the 2016 presidential candidate—of the very significant faction of the GOP that thinks the party’s problems are a lack of clarity and consistency in its conservative ideology, along with a habitual stupidity in presenting it. Take Todd Akin, give him Bobby Jindal’s brains and background, and you’ve got the winning formula!

So Jindal will go arch-demagogic in attacking Washington, even as he tries to build a swampy wingnut paradise back home in Louisiana, with a model regressive tax system that supports conservative evangelical madrassas, and of course none o’ that soul-destroying satanic federal assistance via the Affordable Care Act.

It’s as smart a bet as any for where the Republican Party wants to go right now, which is anywhere other than the “center.” Perhaps the Charlotte appearance will begin a drumbeat of demands for a Jindal candidacy under the slogan: “Call for the exorcist!”

Former LSU health-care system chief Fred Cerise had lots to say about cuts the governor made. He wrote in The Atlantic Monthly that those outside Louisiana should pay note the governor’s health-care decisions in Louisiana.

Cerise, who lost his leadership role in August, talked about an uninsured patient who died because the referral hospital was overwhelmed and 17 other hospitals refused to admit him. He blamed the patient’s death on the governor’s approach to uninsured care.

“Jindal has declared his opposition to the two major programs that would ensure care to the uninsured. He has made clear his intention to reject the federal Medicaid expansion and at the same time is dismantling the state’s public safety net. It’s a combination of blows for many of the state’s citizens who are among the lowest earners in the country and are destined to go without care,” Cerise said.

Please, please please, do not treat this man seriously. Treat him like the plague he is. He is really really really turning us into a swampy wingnut paradise while every one else in the state suffers from no jobs, poor education opportunities, and limited access to health care.

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Great post! I never knew that Jindal’s name wasn’t really Bobby. What a pathetic story. I don’t know why anyone doubts the exorcism story either. The guy is definitely weird enough to do that. Thanks for keeping us informed about Jindal, Dak. Please keep doing it.

The Washington press corps doesn’t do its homework. I felt the same frustrations when Mike Dukakis and Mitt Romney ran for president.

The Beltway media did the same thing for Dubya in 2000. He was a worthless governor, though not as bad as president but only because he couldn’t be. All that education crap they printed for Dubya was completed by Ann Richards before he showed up, except for the later testing BS.

So far I think Chris Christie is the front runner, but I would never recommend leaving our collective guard down where any of these freaks are concerned. As we learned the hard way in 2010, the electorate is easily fooled.

At least of few of the villagers are close enough Virginia or live in some place like Alexandria to know your guys are dangerous. They even cover that on MSNBC. I wish they’d spend some time out here in swamp people land and see what this guy has done to us.

Thank goddess you wrote that dak. I was tempted to but didn’t because I was afraid it would be too parochial.

I commented on Jeff Adelson’s piece that the *only* reason Jindal backed down on the medicaid hospice thing was because it was starting to get traction in the national press. He added that there were some supporters of the hospice program that may have gotten to him too, but I doubt it. I believe it was purely a political move on his part.

Poor Booby is (at least I hope) delusional in his presidential ambitions. Hell, Romney didn’t even call him to tell him he was out and he’s been referred to as a “2nd or 3rd tier candidate” by some of the talking heads in D.C. He’s a little tin pot dictator who is worse than Huey Long when it comes to his control of the state, the lege and the educational system in La. There was a piece on nola.com about Jim Purcell of the Board of Regents basically asking that the universities be given permission to hike tuition and he had some “not nice” things to say about what’s been done to the schools. One of Bobby’s mouthpieces denied what Purcell said so I expect Purcell to be looking for new employment soon.

I did make some comments about the hospice situation because to me, anyone who would think of cutting something like has neither a soul nor any humanity in them. And that’s for Bobby and Brucie Greenstein.

Working with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show, I exposed over 300 schools in nine states and the District of Columbia teaching creationism, and receiving tens of millions of dollars, maybe even hundreds of millions, in public money, through these voucher programs.

Three of the most egregious schools MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show highlighted were:

Liberty Christian School, in Anderson, Indiana, has field trips to the Creation Museum and students learn from the creationist A Beka curriculum.
Creekside Christian Academy in McDonough, Georgia says,”The universe, a direct creation of God, refutes the man-made idea of evolution. Students will be called upon to see the divine order of creation and its implications on other subject areas.”
Rocky Bayou Christian School, in Niceville, Florida, says in its section on educational philosophy, “Man is presumed to be an evolutionary being shaped by matter, energy, and chance… God commands His people not to teach their children the way of the heathen.”

Voucher advocates argue our students will get a better education in these private schools. That is not true. Teaching our students creationism is wrong. American citizens must stand up and demand that their state governments stop funding creationism with public money.

What would hurt Jindal presidential chances the most would be Jindal’s announcement that he is actually going to run. Once even bits and pieces of his bananification of Louisiana get on the national stage (and they will once he calls himself a national candidate), his national ambitions will be as good as dead. And as 2012 campaign taught us, his fellow republicans will do most (or all) of the work tearing him down.

If anyone is interested in the best synopsis available of Bobby Jindal’s negatives, they need look no further. I’m glad Tom Aswell reposted this on Louisiana Voice and I look forward to following skydancing now that I’ve found it.

Thank you so much!!! I think it is really important that the rest of the country know what the governor has done down here. Many seem to fall for his act. I don’t want to foist this man off on any one else and I’d like to put an end to any hope he has for anything else where he can ruin so many lives.

You’re welcome. I’ve suffered through the dismantling of the higher education system. My dermatologist told me that the LSU system is now decreasing the number of residencies and internships in all kinds of specialties so they’re even hitting the number of doctors we’re training which means it can only get worse for every one let alone the huge numbers of poor in the state. Jindal’s really taken advantage of every one and everything to further his ambitions. I just wish we could bring more national attention to it.

Thank you dakinikat and all others for speaking the truth about Jindal on a national venue. The nation needs to know the truth about Jindal and the people for whom he does their will. All of his reforms have been about using the public treasury to enrich the private sector, about taking away from those with the least so that those with the most can profit. All he has done has been in complete disregard for the the common good and rule of law.

Hi! Thanks for stopping by! All those comments about Jindal being a ‘moderate’ sent me into rant mode. I really don’t think the rest of the world knows or cares–at the moment–about what this man has done to our state, our economy, and our children’s futures here.

You should go and watch the Joint Education committee on 1/22/2013. The legislators on that committee were despicable, reading questions that the governor’s minions had prepared. The guilty legislators will be very obvious – you should all be ashamed. I don’t know how you sleep at night! Grow a spine and quit being Jindal stooges. You seem so disappointed that the Governor’s evil grad act hadn’t force any colleges to close yet! Warning – institutions in your back yard are systematically being destroyed and you will have some of the blood on your hands. Good luck geting reelected.

Hi! Thanks for coming and commenting!!! I think this is definitely the session we need to get our legislators to actually do what’s right for their constituents. The Health and Education services are vital employers as well as service providers in the state. Plus, if this tax plan gets passed, all small businesses in border cities will lose business! Tourists will spend less! Nearly every one will have less money in their pockets. None of his plans are good for the state’s economy. Our gradual drop in unemployment has been the result of massive inflows of dollars from the Federal government and the BP law suits. It has nothing to do with what our state government has been up to at all.

My oldest daughter is practicing medicine else where now. She graduated from LSU and left. My youngest just graduated in May and she’s gone too. So, we lost an OB/Gyn and a finance major. My friends are watching their kids leave quickly too.

Yep. I have two in college and one in HS. We are all planning on leaving LA in the next few years as we reach certain milestones in our education and employment livespans. We are happy to take our half-million tax base somewere else. I’m sure my retired parents will tag along as well.

My only disagreement is with your plea, “do not treat this man seriously.” Quite the contrary — the press must treat him seriously. They must subject him and his policies to strict scrutiny. They must not simply accept the propaganda that his minions produce. They must dig — although they won’t have to dig far — for the full and true story. Let’s not forget his refusal of federal funds to build light rail between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which would have immediately provided high-paying jobs in construction and ultimately benefited the entire region. Mayors of both cities and of communities along the routes were in favor, and are still trying to find ways to qualify for that money. Bayou Corne. Sand berms. Forced ultrasounds. The list continues.

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